At a beach, any beach, you meet the ancient earth’s past. Here are the watermarks of eons, where past meets present, one place meets another, and as you walk onto the sands, you can meet them all.

And when you go home, you meet your own past. For me, home was not far away from here. As a child I’d hear this place talked about, but, being a child, I never saw that what I was hearing was what made Formby Beach unique. I heard the details, the strangest differences. Here were red squirrels, not grey ones. Pinewoods near the beach. Purity, close at hand to industry. At low tide, a shipwreck. On a clear day, mountaintops seen over sea. But to me, with the small-eyed, simple-questioned geography of a child (how far was it away, how different were the things in it), Formby was an extension of the familiar, not somewhere new.

But as a child all you really wanted was to feel the sand. Make castles from it. See the sea. Feel it. And there’s good in that. Good in just taking things as you find them, with the curiosity of instinct. It takes us back to an earlier age, in every sense, our younger selves as people, and as a species. Then you move away, you see other places far from home. My places were mountains – studying, climbing, writing about them. And then as you get older you covet the wonder closer by. You re-find a home amidst as much of it as you can. You might have children of your own, and the cycle starts again.   

And then you go home, and you see a place through world-widened eyes, and here again, not far away, was Formby Beach. Beautiful, but more now somehow.

This is a great confluence, a meeting of worlds. Stand here and feel the joining of other places, of people, of elements, and of time. Where wind-bent trees meet dune-grass, dune-grass meets sand. Sand meets sea. Sea links lands over water, over which old lands of different sorts look upon from all sides. Wales, Ireland, Cumberland, the old kingdom of Mann – places whose beaches face the beaches that face them. Were there a mountain here the size of the ones over there in Snowdonia, you would see these places lining the horizon’s edge, like faces around a table.

Here meets wood with sand. Land with sea. Sea with other lands. There is metal in the cranes of the docks over there, in the wreck-ribs of the Ionic Star, in the sand, giving it that colour. Natural attrition is here, too: wind in the stirring of the sands, in the slow spin of the turbines on the horizon. The offshore banks have names that speak of the climate, which is local and strange: Mad Wharf, Angry Brow, Great Burbo. A clear day and cold weather and you can look upon the snow on the Lakeland mountaintops from the snow on this beach. 

And here on this beach you join humans from another time. The roots of the first lifeboat station, now just foundations in the sand. And the traces of much more ancient feet, belonging to the people who found these sands in a time before Stonehenge. What an extraordinary thing to stand in their own step-prints, along with those of deer, boar and crane. Imagine the scene they saw, thousands of years before the people they would become would imagine them, in this place.

Look at the view from a mountain summit and you feel the same joining of elements around you on the horizon. You see it. But in sand you feel it. Its time is deeper. It joins everything and everyone with its story, with a story too ancient for us to understand. Walk down at low tide and feel the grains, fell them grind between your fingers, feel the way they run when dry, and coalesce when wet. Apt that they talk about the “sands of time”, sand being the most extraordinary joining place of all. First the volcanoes birthed it, built mountains, millions of years ago. Then water, time, wind, motion brought the mountains back to earth. Broke them to sand. Reduced it, moved it, layered it, built it to rock. Into mountains. Built it, broke it to sand again. Joined it with more from elsewhere, an earth-time of mineral, bone, shell. Washed it into the sea. Then up, into mountains again. Down, into water. Into the sea. Down, into the earth. Then into deep time, and then the cycle begins again. Rock. Sand. Rock. Sand. The motion of time on earth, like the tides. Like breathing. In a time when we are gone, it will make mountains again.  

Look forward, look back, look around – and think of the tale of time joining you in your hands, when you make your own mountains here on this beach.